Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  That evening was Ryan’s opening, a performance of La Bohème. Putting on his costume backstage, he thought to call his father, to make sure he was getting ready. The last he’d seen him, Cecil and his new friend were serving ribs and bacon jalapeño poppers on Main Street to the longest line at the festival. They were talking about how they should really rent an eighteen-wheeler and start a roaming restaurant, cooking across the country.

  On the phone, Cecil said that he’d lost track of time. He was still barbecuing. Ryan told him to leave—now—to hurry. Cecil made it to his seat in time. He was there: there when Ryan walked onstage, and there for Ryan’s aria as the opera ascended to its desperate climax. Afterward, it was Ryan who watched. In Ryan’s room, his father fed seven singers from the cast, served them the food he’d put aside from earlier at the festival. They gorged on his poppers, feasted on his spicy ribs and wings, and praised the chef to the skies.

  THIRTEEN

  TERRENCE COLEMAN,” RYAN said. He leaned with the heels of his palms on the thin red blanket that protected the top of the piano in Mark Oswald’s studio.

  “Terrence,” Oswald echoed.

  “Terrence, Terrence, Terrence, Terrence,” Ryan repeated.

  They were taking a break from singing runs of notes on particular vowel sounds—up to and down from Ryan’s uppermost E on an ah vowel, up to and down from his highest E on an aw vowel. They were taking a break, as they sometimes did early in a lesson, so Ryan could tell his voice teacher how things were going inside the program. The Met paid Oswald’s fee; he wasn’t on the Met staff. His studio was a few blocks from the opera house and he worked independently, but he knew the Met from the inside, having sung as one of the Met’s leading lyric baritones, performing with Pavarotti and Domingo, before vanishing from the stage a decade ago, when he was thirty-five. For Ryan, he was teacher, counselor, and confessor, and this afternoon there was something Ryan needed to pour out.

  “I’ve been hearing a lot of Terrence talk. Pretty much since I got into the program. Pretty much half the Met people, I mean the Met people with power, are like, ‘Terrence is a singer you should keep in mind.’”

  Oswald sat at his baby grand. Scores crammed the shelves at his back. A box of tissues, piles of music, Post-its and scraps of paper for scribbling notes cluttered the surfaces of the piano; the scraps encroached on the highest and lowest keys. Oswald’s presence was a counterpoint to the chaos. His body, clothed elegantly in a plum-colored dress shirt and black slacks, was compact; his posture was composed; his face formed modulated expressions of sympathy as he listened.

  Growing up in a town amid Pennsylvania farmland, Oswald had sung gospel in the old stone Lutheran church his family attended every Sunday, had sung up front for the congregation of two hundred, harmonized with his father, mother, and sister. “Not rip-roaring gospel,” he said. “It was white-folks-style, dumbed-down gospel, close to the sound of a barbershop quartet.” He’d gone on to a top conservatory, to win the Met contest, to a spot in the Lindemann Program, to being cast as Figaro at the Met, to being selected to sing at a Met gala honoring Maestro Levine in the mid-nineties, priding himself all along on his technical control, on delivering exquisite tones with unerring consistency. Yet he confronted a crushing lack of control over certain things. Asthma plagued him, and he grew more and more fixated on protecting his health, guarding against any inflammation along the pathways of his voice, so that his singing wouldn’t be compromised. He felt that he hardly had a life. “There’s gossip out there that says I was a nervous Nellie, but I believe they don’t understand. My health caused the nerves. It wasn’t that the nerves were a problem on their own.” And he perceived his natural gift as “meager.” Yes, his singing was beautiful, and yes, he had a following among opera buffs, followers who were full of expectations and imagined hearing him sing arias for another twenty-five years, but his repertoire would always be restricted to parts that were lyric, light. No amount of technical acumen was going to expand his proscribed roles. Facing the constraints of his health and his range, Oswald retired, rescaling his life here in his studio.

  “Yesterday was the worst,” Ryan said. He wore a gray T-shirt that read “Talk Nerdy to Me.” He was bent, wilting, propped against the piano, biceps stretching the T-shirt’s sleeves. “Yesterday’s meeting was rock bottom. ‘Can I be brutally honest with you?’ That’s how it began. And then they”—two of the most influential people at the Met—“spent twenty minutes telling me how Terrence Coleman is what we at the Met don’t want you to be. ‘Terrence has a Met-sized voice. Terrence had great potential. But his pronunciation is awful. And his voice is woofy.’”

  Terrence was African American, in mid-career, a bass, a graduate of the program.

  “‘Ryan, you want to bring your sound forward—it’s too far back. Ryan, you have to fix your pronunciation. Terrence in Italian, Terrence in German—Terrence’s pronunciation is so poor, he’s singing words that don’t exist.’ They kept giving me all these examples. Terrence’s problems in this role, Terrence’s problems in that role. The terrible things they’d heard after Terrence’s performances in Europe. ‘We’re not saying you’re like Terrence. No one’s saying that, but there are things to watch out for. No one wants you to be another Terrence.’” Ryan forced out a laugh. “We’re not saying you’re like Terrence—but we’re going to tell you about him so many times that when you look in the mirror you see his face.”

  Oswald winced at what Ryan was reporting, the messages of his first several months as a trainee. Yet he kept the wincing minimal. He steered the conversation to technical solutions. On whether Ryan was generating his sound from too far back, too far from the facial bones, and so failing to sing with the ideal overtones, failing to blend the right degree of operatic brightness into his darkly shaded notes, failing to give his singing enough clarity and brilliance, Oswald promised they would tinker with things together. It was a matter of balance, Oswald believed. “Woofy” and “too far back”—these were ways of describing a sound that seemed lodged too heavily in the throat. Yet the risk was that in brightening the sound, richness would be lost. And a rich timbre was the essence of Ryan’s voice; it was a major part of why he’d made it this close to success.

  “Spacement,” Oswald reminded Ryan, trying to calm him with a word that Oswald had coined. The idea was that a singer had to find and familiarize himself with the sonorous spaces within his anatomy, bones and pockets of resonance from the hard palate to the brow, from the nasal cavity to the region above the soft palate to the chambers farther back and down. The singer had to use these sound-producing structures in just the right combinations. The mixture was different on any given note and differed with every artist. The singer had to learn not only how to locate these resonant spots but how to manipulate them, altering their relationships, their angles, their sizes, and then how to employ “placement” in order to channel the right portions of the voice through the various areas. “Space” and “placement” had merged into one of Oswald’s favorite terms.

  Ryan remained stooped over the piano.

  Oswald assured him that they would add sheen without losing what lay underneath. He moved on to the issue of pronunciation. “If you can simply sing with as legato a line as you can,” he began, soothing Ryan first about his Italian, “if you can move from one vowel sound to the next with as little interruption as possible—if you can treat the single consonants almost as though there is no consonant, you will have won more than half the battle.” He pledged to help him accomplish this, though pronunciation was more the domain of the Lindemann coaches than it was the province of a voice teacher. He asked which aria Ryan wanted to start with today.

  But Ryan had something to add about yesterday’s meeting at the Met. “Another thing they mentioned to me, they said, ‘You know, Terrence has been doing a lot of Show Boats lately. And when someone like Terrence starts doing Show Boat, it’s not because he thinks it’s going to move him in the right direction artistically.
It’s because he needs the work. You want to apply yourself during the program. You want to take advantage of the program, so when you leave here you’re prepared. So you don’t end up singing Joe. So you can avoid the Show Boats. You want to avoid being typecast.’”

  Ryan let out a groan. He lifted his hands off the piano and straightened his torso, ready to get back to work.

  “Eight five three one,” Oswald said.

  He played the sequence and Ryan sang.

  “Try a little bit of umlaut to the mouth,” the teacher suggested. “On that note, the slight alteration of the lips will create the forward resonance.”

  * * *

  Ryan hadn’t needed the advice about Show Boat. The musical and the role of Joe—and Joe’s song, “Ol’ Man River”—had haunted him for years. White people who heard him sing had been urging him to do “Ol’ Man River” since Governor’s. “Oh, I would love to hear you sing ‘Ol’ Man River,’” he’d been told back then by his classmates’ parents and grandparents, and he was told the same by well-wishers in the crowd after the Met finals. He’d heard it uncountable times in between, after performances at his conservatories in Connecticut and Florida and at the community centers in Colorado.

  “You know, son, when I was growing up—have you ever heard of Paul Robeson? Do you know who that is?”

  “Yes, sir, I know who that is.”

  “Well, I could just hear you singing ‘Ol’ Man River’ the way Paul Robeson did.”

  Or they named not Robeson, who’d played Joe in the second Hollywood film of Show Boat, but William Warfield, who’d played Joe in the third.

  “Are you familiar with William Warfield?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  “Because he sang ‘Ol’ Man River,’ and I think you’re the second coming of William Warfield, and I can’t wait to hear you sing that song someday.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  But ‘Thank you’ was not what he wanted to say; grateful was not what he felt. The linking of his voice with two historic black voices wasn’t the problem—about that there was pride. The problem was that in these situations he’d just finished performing Verdi or Puccini or Mozart, and here were these people, these opera lovers, these classical music lovers, telling him that he would be perfect for a role in musical theater.

  “It’s a stab,” he said as he and I walked toward the Met after the hour with Oswald. “It’s a smack in the face if I’ve just sung in a recital, sung Liszt, and someone comes up and says they imagine me as Joe, they see me as Joe, they’d love to hear me as Joe. Not that they’d like to hear me sing something in the genre I’ve chosen. They want to hear me sing something not even in the same stratosphere. It’s like being kicked to the ground.”

  He’d played Joe once. It was during college, with a summer theater company in a beach town in New England. He’d played the black laborer, who toiled on a steamer that paddled the Mississippi River, traveling through the Jim Crow South at the end of the nineteenth century. At stopovers along the shore, the boat’s white owner put on plays for all-white audiences. And all the while, as the boat churned downriver or docked at river towns, Joe and his wife, Queenie, hauled and cooked, sweat and slept in the heat of the steamer’s lower decks and holds.

  The musical, first staged on Broadway in 1927 and in constant revival across the country ever since, was partially a protest against racial divisions. Yet Joe’s signature song, about his longing to escape his life and his envy of the river he works and lives on, had been controversial from the musical’s earliest productions—controversial because Joe sang the word “nigger,” controversial because Joe sang in dialect, controversial for emphasizing the character’s resignation to his degrading plight.

  Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi

  Dat’s de ol’ man dat I wants to be

  What does he care if de world’s got troubles

  What does he care if de land ain’t free

  Ol’ man river, dat ol’ man river

  He must know sumpin’, but don’t say nothin’

  He jes’ keeps rollin’

  He keeps on rollin’ along

  He don’t plant taters, he don’t plant cotton

  An’ dem dat plants ’em is soon forgotten

  But ol’ man river

  He jes’ keeps rollin’ along

  You an’ me, we sweat an’ strain

  Body all achin’ an’ racked wid pain,

  Tote dat barge! Lift dat bale!

  Git a little drunk an’ you lands in jail

  Ah gits weary an’ sick of tryin’

  Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ skeered of dyin’

  But ol’ man river

  He jes’ keeps rollin’ along

  Niggers all work on de Mississippi

  Niggers all work while de white folks play

  Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset

  Gittin’ no rest till de judgment day

  Don’t look up an’ don’t look down

  You don’t dast make de white boss frown

  Bend your knees an’ bow your head

  An’ pull dat rope until yo’ dead

  Let me go ’way from de Mississippi

  Let me go ’way from de white man boss

  Show me dat stream called de River Jordan

  Dat’s de ol’ stream dat’s I long to cross

  Before he played the role, Ryan learned about the musical’s themes and history. Until then, though he’d known about Joe and his anthem, he hadn’t known much about the overall story, about its portrait of a mixed-race couple among the troupe that performed the shows in the riverside towns: a white man and a woman who was passing, a woman with a fraction of black ancestry. He hadn’t known much about the musical’s elements of protest. He learned, too, about the debates over the song’s lyrics. For the 1936 movie, “niggers” had been changed to “darkies.” Robeson, in recitals, had gone further, getting rid of “Dere’s an ol’ man” and singing, instead, “There’s an ol’ man.” He’d insisted on adding dignity by cutting “Git a little drunk an’ you lands in jail” and substituting “Show a little grit and you lands in jail.”

  What Ryan learned—that Show Boat was critical of racism and that Robeson, who later became a civil rights activist, had partly accepted those lyrics as accurate to the time and place and character of Joe and partly changed them to honor Joe’s intelligence and moments of defiance—had made him eager for opening night. He was going to be using Robeson’s version of the song.

  Then, in front of the summer theater audience, Ryan’s singing of “Ol’ Man River” brought the musical to a halt. The immediate applause made it impossible for the cast to go on. The clapping surged in tandem with his final note, swelled, became a standing ovation. For minutes, the clapping didn’t subside and the crowd didn’t sit.

  He didn’t credit himself. He couldn’t. He knew better. This had been the response to “Ol’ Man River” since Show Boat’s initial Broadway runs. Stirred by Joe’s song, white audiences had risen right away to their feet.

  “It disturbed me, to stand there and feel it. It actually shocked me—the extent of it. I’ve never had longer applause in my life. Not before, not since. We did four or five performances, and every night it was the same. Every night everything came to a stop. White people love this piece of music. If I sang it in front of African American people, I can tell you, they might clap, but they wouldn’t be yelling for more. They wouldn’t be yelling for me to sing it again. That’s what those people wanted. And I didn’t want to sing it again. I gave them a few lines. But I’m feeling, Why? And here I am, still asking, why are white people so moved by this song? It’s about something you shouldn’t want to hear about from me. It’s about how everything, every day, is so hard because of you. Because of white people putting black people down. It’s about being oppressed. It’s about being free but not free. It’s about a man who’s a second-class citizen, who has to live belowdeck, who makes two cents a day. He�
��ll never earn enough money, never earn the respect he deserves, never be treated equally. He’ll always have to watch his people get treated like crap. And his only consolation is death. When he dies he’ll be free.

  “But everyone in that theater, they couldn’t get enough of it. They’re cheering and crying. I’m belittling myself the whole show to appease the white man. I don’t know what Kern and Hammerstein, the two white guys who wrote it, I don’t know what their intention was. But Joe was pleasing to the white man in the nineteen twenties. He was pleasing to white people who had separate toilets and sinks for black people. Joe doesn’t know how to talk. Everyone around him who is white talks in a completely different way. And ‘Ol’ Man River’ is pleasing white people to this day.”

  * * *

  “I’m going to spend the rest of my life getting out from that shadow,” Ryan said. He disappeared then, descending to the subterranean levels of the Met for a coaching session on Italian pronunciation.

  Ken Noda had warned him. He would be judged more critically than a white singer. “I can speak to you as a minority,” Noda had said. “I can speak to you as a person with a not-white face. People assume you won’t be as good. You have to be twice as good. Our preparation has to be twice as strong. Because of my face, because of my Japanese features, people looked at me at first with an expression that was like, Do you know anything about this art form? Can you possibly know anything? Even now, after all these years here, I feel like I have to be ready to fight that look. It’s something I walk around with. I’m still afraid that someone might look at me in that way.”